Skills training is gaining increasing importance in the law school curriculum, as well it should. One of the impediments to early efforts at skills training was the scarcity of materials to aid in presenting an organized, comprehensive skills program. To the extent that materials existed, they covered, for the most part, only one aspect of skills training. It was necessary to look to one source for interviewing skills, to another source for counseling, and to still another source for negotiation. Even then, it was often necessary to search the discouraging maze of behaviorial science literature to test and sharpen the accumulation of hunches of generations of lawyers.

The comprehensive text of Professors Jeffrey Hartje and Mark Wilson, entitled Lawyers’ Work, makes the lives of the skills teacher and the skills student much easier. In one volume, the authors have drawn together all, or almost all,1 the skills, until now largely neglected by law schools, necessary in the formation of competent, ethical lawyers.